Suriname is home to more than twenty languages, spoken among its approximately
half million people. Given the high degree of multilingualism in the country (ABS
2006), it is not surprising that languages spoken in Suriname have influenced each
other and continue to do so in some way. This dissertation reports on several ways in
which languages interact and on the outcomes of this language interaction, including
creation of new languages, changes to linguistic structures, and language death.
Given that the majority of people in the world are multilingual, the study of the
processes and outcomes of language contact have, and will likely continue to
provide valuable insights beyond a traditional assumption in much of historical
linguistics – that the main impetus for a language’s development is system internal.
Although this assumption often holds for some aspects of some languages’
grammatical systems (e.g. regular sound changes well attested in the Indo-European
family, or typical paths of grammaticalization, see e.g. Campbell 2004), a number of
case studies (see Bakker and Mous 1994, Thomason 1997, Matras and Sakel 2007,
to name but a few) have demonstrated that languages also influence each other in all
areas of the lexicon and grammar.
The efficacy of bi- or multilingual interaction in bringing some sort of permanent
change to a language is often attributed to language external (i.e. sociocultural)
factors of a particular speech community and the wider sociolinguistic context in
which a particular speech community is situated (cf. Thomason and Kaufmann
1988). The study of language contact in Suriname is advantageous in that there are a
variety of speech communities with drastically different sociocultural circumstances,
whose languages fill different societal niches and fall into different relative
sociolinguistic scenarios. In short, Suriname has a great deal to offer to current
understanding of language contact.
At the outset of this project, the range of possibilities for a research design
seemed nearly endless. “Language contact in Suriname” was the point of departure
which allowed for a rather free choice of languages to be included and methods to
investigate issues pertinent to those languages. Since its inception as a subfield of
historical linguistics, contact linguistics has diversified to include not only
diachronic changes in grammatical systems as in historical linguistics, but also
bilingual speech communities (sociolinguistics) and bilingual individuals
(psycholinguistics). However, as Muysken (2013) notes, in academic practice, these
assorted takes on language contact remain separate in terms of terminology, research
questions, methodologies, conferences, etc., despite widespread agreement that
individuals, speech communities, and linguistic structure all play an interrelated role
in the mechanisms and outcomes of language contact. In the following paragraphs, I
will present the approaches of just a few scholars who have been most influential in
both the field of contact linguistics and in my own approach to the topic.